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Lucia's Pony
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I am a stag: of seven tines,
I am a flood: across a plain, I am a wind: on a deep lake, I am a tear: the sun lets fall, I am a hawk: above the cliff, I am a thorn: beneath the nail, I am a wonder: among flowers, I am a wizard: who but I Sets the cool head aflame with smoke? I am a spear: that roars for blood, I am a salmon: in a pool, I am a lure: from paradise, I am a hill: where poets walk, I am a boar: ruthless and red, I am a breaker: threatening doom, I am a tide: that drags to death, I am an infant: who but I Peeps from the unhewn dolmen arch? I am the womb: of every holt, I am the blaze: on every hill, I am the queen: of every hire, I am the shield: for every head, I am the tomb: of every hope
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I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow. Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening's full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore: While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core. ~ William Butler Yeats {Sorry; That was William Butler Yeats}
Today the electoral college voters elect the new president elect The Second Coming Turning and Turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehim to be born? I cannot agree that I am any less happy than Socrates was, or that I have more leisure than he had, or that an understanding of the language of myth is irrelevant to self-knowledge. I deduce---------that he had spent a long time worrying about the Chimaera, the horse-centaurs and the rest, but that the 'reasons of their being' had eluded him because he was no poet and mistrusted poets, and because, as he admitted to Phaedrus, he was a confirmed townsman who seldom visited the countryside: 'fields and trees will not teach me anything, but men do.' The study of mythology, as I shall show, is based squarely on tree-lore and seasonable observation of life in the fields.
~the White Goddess Robert Graves |
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